Euro study trips report

Posted on Monday 1st February 2010

Second year students have recently returned from study trips to Brussels and Paris. Every year all second year History of Art students make a study trip to a European capital city, in the company of the department's staff, in order to study at firsthand objects and buildings specific to one of that year's modules. The costs of travel and accommodation are paid by the department, so the expense to students is kept low. The destination of these trips varies and in recent years groups have visited Rome, Berlin and Venice.

Brussels

Students on February's Brussels trip were able to make a number of visits outside the city to many of Belgium's and Holland's most significant sites of art history. These included Bruges, Antwerp, Rotterdam and most excitingly, Ghent, where the students were able to see and study in detail Jan Van Eyck's remarkable altarpiece. Students also made independent trips to their chosen sites in order to carry out the kind of object-focused research that the department endorses. One intrepid individual even travelled to Cologne in Germany to see relics of St. Ursula.

Paris

Students on the trip to Paris visited the city's many fantastic museums, including the Louvre (see photo), the Musée d'Orsay and the newly re-furbished and ever more spectacular advertising, furniture and fashion collections of the Museum of the Decorative Arts. Visits were also made to less familiar collections, such as the remarkable Museum of the Thirties at Boulogne-Billancourt and the Gustave Moreau Museum, which offered an invaluable insight into the domestic life of a nineteenth-century artist. As with the trip to Belgium, students took up the opportunity to carry out their own primary research in preparation for the presentation that each gives as part of the second year assessment.

Students on the trip to Paris visited the city's many fantastic museums, including the Louvre (see photo), the Musée d'Orsay and the newly re-furbished and ever more spectacular advertising, furniture and fashion collections of the Museum of the Decorative Arts. Visits were also made to less familiar collections, such as the remarkable Museum of the Thirties at Boulogne-Billancourt and the Gustave Moreau Museum, which offered an invaluable insight into the domestic life of a nineteenth-century artist. As with the trip to Belgium, students took up the opportunity to carry out their own primary research in preparation for the presentation that each gives as part of the second year assessment.